Introduction

On New Year’s Eve 1900, the Swedish educator and feminist Ellen Key published Barnetsarhundrade (translated, when published in English nine years later, as The Century of the Child). Her rather utopian prediction that everyone’s right to a secure, happy childhood could be achieved was not, of course, realized. Yet the phrase has become an often ironic term for historians of children and youth, who have spent the last two generations exploring the ways in which the twentieth century has and has not lived up to Key’s heightened expectations.

This super-sized volume of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth ranges across the world and through the 1900s to examine many of the issues that faced children and youth during that fraught period. The eight essays examine the ways in which wars affected children in South Africa and in Japan, explore efforts to determine and shape children’s intelligence and sexuality, study the institutionalization of the chronically ill and the pregnant, and investigate grandiose plans to make men by colonizing boys and to capture childhood through commercialization. Each article, in its own way, shows reformers or policy makers or educators or advocates or businessmen (not to mention parents and children themselves) trying to make sense out of the challenges and opportunities created by international conflict, rapidly improving technology, advances in science and healthcare, and changing notions of childhood and youth. Their efforts to impose order on these transformations provide one of the key themes of the so-called Century of the Child, many of which continue to puzzle and plague children and adults in the twenty-first century.

Finally, a note of congratulations to Nicholas L. Syrett, whose article “‘I Did and I Don’t Regret It’: Child Marriage and the Contestation of Childhood in the United States” (JHCY Spring 2013) was unanimously chosen to receive the Fass-Sandin Prize for the best article (in English) on the history of children and youth published in 2013. The prize committee also extended Honorable Mention to Helle Strandgaard Jensen’s “TV as Children’s Spokesman: Conflicting Notions of Children and Childhood in Danish Children’s Television around 1968” (JHCY Winter 2013). The committee’s commendations can be found on the SHCY website at http://shcyhome.org/.